Morocco, Take Two

“You’re such a guy.” Thami said.

I’d met him at the Grand Cafe in central Tangier after arranging with him earlier that day to show me around his hometown. His comment was in reference to my spontineity, I guess. I’d arrived in the country 30 minutes before, having planned the whole trip not more than two hours prior after a flight lesson that I had planned was cancelled. When he asked me where I had planned to stay the night, I just shrugged and said, “I’ll figure it out.”

A Last-Minute Adventure

Granted, all I had was a backpack and a thirst for a little adventure, so being spontaneous and making decisions on the fly was not particularly difficult. Velez-Malaga was my home for the time being and its location just across the Straight of Gibraltar was begging for me to make the trip. I packed an overnight bag, hopped in a car and made my way down the A-7 to a town where I’d vaguely remembered catching a ferry almost 2 decades before with a tour group from my high school Spanish class.

Crossing the Strait: The Fast Ferry

Finally deciding it was prudent to exercise at least a little planning, I pulled off at a roadside building marked by a large sign: Africa Link Tickets. Tangier. And I was glad I did. The man behind the desk informed me that if I was traveling solo, on foot and wanted to make the crossing quick, I should drive the 20 extra minutes to Tarifa, rather than to Algeciras where I was headed, to catch the quick ferry which made the crossing in 30 minutes and dropped off by the city center, rather than a sluggish two hour sail which docked at a harbor one hour outside of town.

And so arriving in Tarifa, I booked the tour with Thami, parked the car for the night, and boarded the ferry for Tangier. Some apprehension lingered, as I thought back to my last crossing, when almost the entire group got seasick on account of the unfortunate combination of car exhaust permeating the cabin and the choppy waters being kicked up by the gusty winds common to the area. During this crossing, the seas were calm and the passenger cabin was pleasant enough, or at least not filled with toxic fumes.

Exploring Tangier with Thami

When I met Thami, I could tell he was already exhausted, having just parted ways with a different party he’d guided around the city, which I got the impression was more demanding than your average group. We sat down, ordered a mint tea and as he caught his breath we chatted about Tangier, my plans for the evening and how he thought my limited time in this city in which he’d lived his whole life and loved to his core would unfold.

I assured him that I’d be an easy client, and when I mentioned that I was also a guide on the WithLocals platform in my home city of Amsterdam so he was in good company. He excitedly asked if he could document the journey, a unique circumstance of a guide guiding a guide.

As we set off walking around the city, we walked through the ancient gates of the Medina, and passed now closed chic hotels clinging to the cliffsides by the shore signaling a time when the city was a popular destination for the rich and famous around the world – we stopped at the iconic Café Baba tea shop that has hosted the likes of Keith Richards, Kofi Annan and Truman Capote. Sipping my tea, I could picture Keith relaxing outside on the terrace, in cloud of hasheesh, looking out at the rooftops of the medina. Maybe he was imagining painting one of the many red doors around town black. 

The city is a bustling tourism hub and in many ways just as “western” feeling as its counterparts just miles away in Spain like Malaga or Granada, a comparison that is perhaps backwards, as the whitewashed narrow alleys punctuated by pink bougainvilleas and adobe homes of Andalusia are not “western” at all. That southern Spain bears any semblance to Africa is due to it being dominated by the same moorish dynasties from this side of the Mediterranean for hundreds of years until pushed out by the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella during the Reconquista in 1492. 

As Thami and I walked around the city, I could feel its roots and how he had fallen so in love with it. Sure, like many old European cities, it has a well preserved and restored old town which bustles with street vendors, souvenir shops and overcrowded terraces filled with people watching tourists (among them, myself), but it also has the authenticity of a real life city, and one which has not gone all in on simply chasing the tourist dollar at the expense of its history, culture and its people.

I recall the first time I’d come to the city, in 2003, feeling as if crossing over to another continent and entering the Muslim world was so exotic and foreign. I remember having upon my return to Spain a sense of coming home, even though Spain remained thousands of miles from where I lived. But this trip, it was different.

Shared Humanity Across Cultures

In spite of the Arabic signs, the mosques, the tea instead of beer, Tangier didn’t feel alien at all. Part of me, I admit, was even disappointed by this epiphany. As if in a way I expected or hoped that being culturally “immersed” should have involved encountering some cultural curiosity, like Captain Cook first encountering Māoris in New Zealand or Henry Hudson the native tribes of what is now the northeastern USA.

But this wasn’t the case. What I found was young guys watching a Champions League match in the taverns, albeit over mint teas and not beers; moms and dads pushing their children around in strollers; joggers along the beach. Nothing about this struck me as particularly foreign, and while I walked around town with Thami, as he proudly described the city’s rich history, its old cultural quirks and well as its progress towards being a modern city in the last decades, I thought that in another life, Thami could have been me, and I him. The Morocco I had half-expected from childhood stories and Disney films — snake charmers, exotic bazaars — was gone, if it had ever truly existed.

The next morning, as the Rock of Gibraltar came into view on the return ferry, I felt a twinge of sadness. Maybe I’d grown immune to the thrill of the unfamiliar. Maybe part of me wanted the disorientation of encountering a world with no points of reference, like a sailor sighting Tahiti for the first time. But what I carried instead was something quieter and, perhaps, more lasting — a sense of shared humanity.

The crossing thankfully going off again without incident, I hopped back in the car and retraced my way up the coast towards Velez-Malaga, passing Spanish towns once inhabited by ancestors of those same North Africans just across the Straight. And it was easy, John Lennon may have said, to Imagine I’d not been to any different country at all.